The advanced management of manuscript evaluations was the focus of the first ScholarOne refresher course at SciELO

By Alex Mendonça

Photo: SciELO

The course titled Curso de Atualização SciELO-ScholarOne (Refresher course SciELO – ScholarOne) was held on August 7 in the auditorium  Governador Carlos Alberto de Carvalho Pinto at FAPESP in São Paulo. There were 180 participants from 77 journals in different areas of knowledge. Amongst those present were editors-in chief, members of editorial boards, and professionals from editorial teams of the SciELO journals that are using Thomson Reuters’ online manuscript management platform ScholarOne.

The SciELO Program began using the ScholarOne system in 2012 and since then has been training the teams from the journals that have opted to use the system. As of August 2015, editorial teams from 113 journals had been trained. Of these, 88 use the system regularly and 30 others are in the process of migrating to it. The aim of the course was to update the knowledge of each of the teams that use the system and bring them all to the same level since a good part of the them went through personnel changes or changes in their editorial policies over the last few years. Also, new features had been introduced in ScholarOne.

Photo: SciELO

The course program was designed to meet the demands of the journals that use the system daily for the receipt of manuscripts and the management of their evaluation. It covered advanced topics in the use of ScholarOne, best practices, common pitfalls, solutions to problems, and tips, among others. A focus of the course was on improving the use of the different resources offered by ScholarOne, some which were unfamiliar to most or not previously used, so that the journals could take better advantage of the system to make their manuscript evaluation work flows more efficient and professional. The course lasted 7 hours and addressed improving the professionalization of the editorial teams, which is one of SciELO’s three priority lines of action. However, the other two SciELO lines of action, internationalization and financial sustainability, also entered the discussions.

Lilian Pessoa spoke about ORCID. Photo: SciELO

Invited speakers were Lilian Pessoa, ORCID’s Regional Director for Latin America, and Silvia Galletti, Vice-president of the  Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) – the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors – and also Editor-in-chief of the journal Arquivos do Instituto Biológico (indexed in the SciELO Brazil collection).

Silvia Galletti (ABEC) spoke about the agreement with iThenticate. Photo: SciELO

Lilian Pessoa gave an introduction to ORCID and the importance of the adoption of ORCID by the scientific community. ScholarOne has integrated ORCID into its functions, and improvements to this integration are foreseen in upcoming updates to the system. When asked about a possible integration of ORCID with the Lattes platform (platform of Brazilian researcher CV’s) of CNPq, Lilian replied that definitely there is an expectation for this to happen.

Silvia Galletti presented the agreement that ABEC offers for the contracting of the plagiarism detection software iThenticate. First available only to members of ABEC, the agreement was extend this past June to cover the SciELO journals. iThenticate is also integrated into the ScholarOne system.

The criteria of SciELO Brazil require that, by the end of 2015, all journals indexed by SciELO Brazil should be processing the evaluation of manuscripts online with an in-house or off-the-shelf system or service which meets SciELO’s requirements regarding the production of statistics about article processing flows, such as the number of manuscripts received, the percentage of immediate rejections, the percentage approved after evaluation by associate editors and peer reviewers, the number of domestic and foreign authors, and the editors and peer-reviewers involved. Accordingly, the course program had a panel whose focus was on the tool to create customized statistical reports in ScholarOne.

In addition to ScholarOne, SciELO makes the OJS submission management system available to the journals it indexes. OJS is the system SciELO uses in its publication process. A refresher course in OJS is being planned for the 39 SciELO journals that currently use it.

We are already reaping the benefits of this first course. Several journals have already made changes based on the recommendations received during the course. The outlook is to hold events such as this one yearly, in line with the principles and objectives of SciELO.

References

GALLETTI, S. Acordo ABEC/iThenticate. In: I Curso de Atualização SciELO-ScholarOne, São Paulo, 2015. 21 slides. Available from: http://en.slideshare.net/scielo/acordo-abecithenticate-silvia-galletti

MENDONÇA, A. Boas práticas, erros comuns, resolução de problemas e dicas de uso no ScholarOne. In: I Curso de Atualização SciELO-ScholarOne, São Paulo, 2015. 68 slides. Available from: http://en.slideshare.net/scielo/boas-prticas-erros-comuns-resoluo-de-problemas-e-dicas-de-uso-no-scholarone-alex-mendona

MENDONÇA, A. and ALMEIDA, F. Desmistificando o Cognos – Construindo relatórios de estatísticas customizados. In: I Curso de Atualização SciELO-ScholarOne, São Paulo, 2015. 82 slides. Available from: http://en.slideshare.net/scielo/desmistificando-o-cognos-construindo-relatrios-de-estatsticas-customizados-alex-mendona

PACKER, A.L. Online management of manuscripts is a required indexing criterion of SciELO. SciELO in Perspective. [viewed 13 August 2015]. Available from: http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/04/01/online-management-of-manuscripts-is-a-required-indexing-criterion-of-scielo/

PACKER, A.L., MENDONÇA, A. and ALMEIDA, F. The SciELO journals are being improved by the adoption of classic workflows relating to the online management of article submissions. SciELO in Perspective. [viewed 13 August 2015]. Available from: http://blog.scielo.org/en/2014/07/30/the-scielo-journals-are-being-improved-by-the-adoption-of-classic-workflows-relating-to-the-online-management-of-article-submissions/

PESSOA, L. ORCID: adoção e uso pela comunidade científica. In: I Curso de Atualização SciELO-ScholarOne, São Paulo, 2015. 22 slides. Available from: http://en.slideshare.net/scielo/scielo-7-july2015

External links

ABEC: Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos – <http://www.abecbrasil.org.br/>

I Curso de Atualização SciELO-ScholarOne – <http://eventos.scielo.org/iscielo-scholarone/>

iThenticate – <http://www.ithenticate.com/>

ORCID – <http://orcid.org/>

ScholarOne Manuscripts – http://scholarone.com

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Nicholas Cop Consulting.